The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus Read Free Book Online Page A

could be replaced by someone with the same personal name. This act followed logically from the premise that any two people who shared the same name were magically linked.
    Let us now consider the implications of seal-sharing partnerships. The Netsilik did not have clans or, for that matter, any social grouping larger than the extended family. Clearly, however, they felt the need for a widespread network of allies on whom they could rely to share resources when they were scarce. They created such a network using only their language and the magical power of the name, choosing respected acquaintances to be their sons’ “hindquarters,” “kidneys,” and so forth. And once that network was operating, they allowed parts of it to become hereditary.
    Twelve meat-sharing partners is admittedly a small group compared to a clan. But when we consider how many partnerships there were, and the likelihood that a set of brothers might belong to several, we can picture a mutual aid network covering thousands of square miles.
    PROVIDING ARCHAEOLOGICAL TIME DEPTH
    The Netsilik data suggest that foragers without clans sometimes created extensive networks of cooperating nonrelatives. Can archaeology detect similar networks among ancient societies?
    To answer that question we turn to the prehistoric Folsom culture that occupied Colorado 11,000 years ago, near the end of the Ice Age. Colorado had no caribou, but it did have Bison antiquus, a creature some 20 percent larger than today’s buffalo. Assuming that its habits were similar to the modern bison, this beast would have migrated north to the High Plains in the summer and back to the southern plains in the winter.
    Archaeologists Mark Stiger and David Meltzer have excavated a possible winter camp made by Folsom hunters, 8,600 feet above sea level near Gunnison, Colorado. There they have found the remains of circular huts, roughly the size of the mammoth hunters’ houses at Mezhirich. The best-preserved one had a basin-shaped floor sunk more than a foot below ground surface; a ring of postholes suggests that the hut had a conical roof, made of branches and daubed with clay to protect the occupants from wind and snow. The fact that the huts found so far were laid out in an arc makes one wonder if they were arranged around an open area, set aside for communal or ritual activity. Such an arrangement was common among foragers.
    Some 2,000 feet lower, in the foothills of the mountains near Colorado’s border with Wyoming, lies the legendary Folsom site of Lindenmeier. Eleven thousand years ago it was the scene of multiple hunting camps on a low ridge, overlooking a wet meadow that attracted migrating bison. Lindenmeier, excavated by Frank H. H. Roberts in the 1930s, was painstakingly reanalyzed by Edwin N. Wilmsen. One of Wilmsen’s most exciting conclusions was that at least two different groups of bison hunters, each with its own style of tool manufacture and its own widespread network of partners, had converged on Lindenmeier to collaborate in the hunt.
    Folsom hunters possessed the spear-thrower known by its ancient Mexican name the atlatl. The flint points of their spears are considered technological masterpieces. Folsom hunters made the edges of the point sharp and symmetrical by delicately removing tiny parallel flakes. As a final touch, they skillfully struck off a long channel down each face of the point, making it easier to insert in a wooden shaft.
    Both groups at Lindenmeier made points of this type. The hunters in one encampment, called Area I, gave theirs gently rounded shoulders and trimmed the edges with small overlapping flakes, taken off at a 90-degree angle to the long axis of the point. Hunters who were camped 330 feet away in Area II, however, gave their points more abruptly angled shoulders and trimmed the edges with nonoverlapping flakes, taken off at a 45-degree angle to the long axis. Each group, in other words, appears to have come to Lindenmeier from a region with